Fratto, now a managing partner at Hamilton Place Strategies LLC, a Washington-based consulting firm for financial companies, says monetary policy is “the least well-understood” of economic disciplines -- and that makes the central bank an easy target.

Those targeting it include the “Audit the Fed” movement led by Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, whose father Ron Paul has been a standard-bearer for gold. Trump and Sanders are among those who’ve endorsed the effort to scrutinize the central bank’s books.

Playing Games

For other critics, the goal is to impose new rules on the Fed. What would they look like? Cato’s Selgin favors the ideas of a school known as market monetarists, who say the money supply should be adjusted according to a target for overall spending in the economy.

Another, better-known option is the Taylor Rule, which dictates interest-rate adjustments based on changes to inflation and output. The formula has fans in Congress. It’s surfaced in some of the multiple bills aimed at overhauling the Fed -- none of which have yet reached the floor of the House.

Bill Huizenga, a Michigan Republican and chairman of the House Financial Services subcommittee on monetary policy, sponsored one of them. He sees talk of a new gold standard as “more of an academic exercise than a real-world exercise,” but supports rules that would restrain the “games being played” by central banks worldwide.

George Gilder thinks gold-standard ideas are on the way back whatever the politicians do. Founder and chairman of the Gilder Technology Group and a bestselling author who helped popularize supply-side economics in the Reagan era, he says the trillions of dollars that fly around global currency markets every day are a “bizarre abuse of capitalism,” sucking vitality out of the real economy.

Apocalypse Soon?

Gilder sees hope in countries like China that are “oriented toward a gold valuation” -- the Chinese are unfairly maligned for manipulating their currency, he says, when what they wanted was to do the opposite and fix its value -- and in the rise of bitcoin, a digital version of gold.

Running through a lot of the gold talk is an apocalyptic strain. True believers think a crash is coming that will blow away the current consensus, leaving only their ideas standing.